Comments on: UK Study Finds Vampire Energy Bloody Costly

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 10:03:00 +0000

Corrected. Thanks for the catch.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 17:35:00 +0000

Pete, you are right. This is an incredibly badly written article and I doubt the author even read the original source. I assume they got the $1,340 figure from the blog post they are referencing (on Earth Techling). In that post the author writes “households spent up to £861 ($1,340) a year keeping appliances in a standby, or ‘non-active’, state”. This statement seems to be correct, just poorly written and unclearly stated. The author of this piece must have read the Earth Techling post, missunderstood the statement, not bothered to check the original source, and then quickly whipped up this article which misses everything.

In the actual report it says that £859 is the upper limit of the yearly electricity bills for households which were included in the survey. This is not the cost of the electricity used for standby electronics, it is the total yearly electricity bill for the household. The average yearly bill was £530.

Of the total yearly electricity bill, the report claims 9-16% was due to electricity usage of electronic devices in standby mode. This comes to an average of £50-86.

The $2 billion yearly cost for non-active applicances was also stated in the Earth Techling post. While I can’t find any direct reference to that figure in the original report, it is widely reported around the internet and is probably correct. Assuming the maximum £86 per household per year in electricity cost for non-active devices, it would only take about 15 million households to reach £1.3 billion. If the yearly cost was £861 as claimed in this post, the annual cost would be closer to £13 billion.

By: Ronald Brak

Ronald Brak — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 21:33:00 +0000

$1,340 is more than twice my yearly electricity bill.

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:21:00 +0000

Pete_dl,

An example:
– central heating boiler: 7 W
– set top box; 10 W
– door bell transformer: 4 W
– (old) tv: 3 W
– game console: 9 W
– internet modem: 9 W

3 W doesn’t seem like a lot, neither does 7 W, but there is also a 4, and a 10 and two 9’s. The above list doesn’t seem unrealistic for an average household, many modern households have far more gadgets. Add all the items up and the total power draw is 42 W. Multiply by 7000 hours of non-use, and the result is an annual consumption of ~300 kWh. Nearly 10% of an average household. 10% is definitely significant.

Don’t fall into the trap that small things don’t matter. The counterpoint is that small things come in large numbers. What might help you to understand is that the total biomass of termites is orders of magnitude greater than that of elephants.

Prof MacKay’s book contains a lot of useful information, but he is definitely wrong on this one because he dismisses each ‘termite’ in isolation as negligible and doesn’t see the whole picture.

By: Pete_dl

Pete_dl — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 08:56:00 +0000

where does this $1,340 come from ? I read £50 per year, which is much more reasonable.

Please read this free book http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html

It argues well that vampire energy is not important. Every BIG helps. not Every little helps.

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 06:06:00 +0000

A quick rule of thumb is to multiply the standby power by 10 to obtain the kWh per year. A game console that consumes 10 W in standby is thus responsible for ~100 kWh per year.